First the documentation is less than perfect.
But taking Ken on his word, as of course I am happy to do, there are still a lot of questions. It does not quite add up in this version to 'Mattick organising Strasser's speaking tour' as we were originally promised. First the tour is not attributed to Mattick, but to 'the organisation'. Which? The Living Marxism that Mattick wrote for was not an organisation, but a journal. Was it the Councils of Correspondence that organised the tour? And the leaflet that was included in the pile of Living Marxisms, was it even a part of the publication?
After all, memory can play tricks.
My two favourite books on German Fascism, Robert Black's Fascism in Germany and Guerin's 'Fascism and Big Business' both quote Strasser at length, as demonstration of the coalescence of Fascism and business and the suppression of the 'plebeian' element of the NSDAP. Does this make Black and Guerin fascists? I don't think so. Rather, one needs to know what the context of the speeches were.
Also, if Ken is right about the date, it might be pointed out that at that time the entirety of the Communist International was defending the Hitler-Stalin pact of the time - an alliance with the Hitler government. By contrast Strasser had broken with Hitler in 1930 - not wishing to make any apologies on his behalf. Does it follow then that attendance at, say, the Brecht Forum qualifies as support for Brecht, ergo for the Hitler-Stalin pact, and ergo for Fascism. That chain of reasoning seems no less tenuous than this identification of Hitler-Strasser-a leaflet- Living Marxism-Mattick-Rakesh.
That said, I do endorse Ken's critique of Mattick's spontaneism (though Rakesh would not).
In message <ad867263.369cf627 at aol.com>, Apsken at aol.com writes
>Off-list James heartfield asked me for documentation of my report on Paul
>Mattick's connection to Otto Strasser. Below is a copy of my reply.
>Incidentally, the political point is not simply one of 50-plus years past.
>Several of the insurgent Nazi terror groups, both in the U.S. and in Europe,
>are Strasserite (revolutionary anti-capitalist plebeian national socialist --
>"red" Nazis) whose political lines are pitched to militant proletarians,
>marginal family farmers, and struggling petit bourgeois. Some of them believe
>that sections of the Marxist left also are prospective converts.
>
>Ken Lawrence
>
>James,
>
>Unfortunately my archives are beyond my reach in Mississippi, in the hands of
>a hostile former spouse. Some years ago at a Socialist Party book bazaar in
>Chicago I purchased a run of Living Marxism from the 1940s and 50s, which
>included a pile of the organization's leaflets. Among those was the one
>advertising the Strasser tour.
>
>Abstractly, it should not have surprised me, because it reflected the triumph
>of spontaneist politics above all, as well as the view that Leninism is the
>main enemy of the proletariat. But I was myself part of the broader
>spontaneist Marxist current myself, being a friend and comrade of C.L.R.
>James, so this caused me plenty of soul searching.
>
>The Who's Who I quoted also says this about Strasser: "During his exile in
>Sweden and Canada, Otto Strasser became an advocate of 'solidarism', a third
>path between capitalism and communism, which he gave a national-socialist,
>Christian and decentralized 'Europeanist' colouring. Returning to post-war
>West Germany, Otto Strasser tried and failed to win public support for these
>ideas in the 1950s after he had recovered his German citizenship. In other
>respects he appeared to have learned nothing from the past, still espousing a
>vicious, demagogic anti-semitism in his journmalistic publications."
>
>I think you can see from that the points that appealed to Mattick. But the
>collaboration was unforgivable nonetheless.
>
>Ken
-- Jim heartfield